Dead before 30: Jean-Michel Basquiat, painter

When he was sixteen, Jean-Marie Basquiat and a friend began painting cryptic phrases around the Manhattan art district and signing them with the tag SAMO. They weren't much, just a few words and the tag - kind of like tweets in that they were short, amusing, and put on display for the world from relative anonymity. Somehow, these little nuggets teased the art world's gatekeepers into such a state of curiosity that when Basquiat outed himself and killed off SAMO, his own art career took off like a meteor. This was in the early eighties, when a booming economy and Reagan-era policies gave young noveau-riche tons of spare cash to throw at art. They found a target in Basquiat. Yhis young, wild child of a Haitian immigrant had just the right whiff of the other to seem dangerous. Soon Basquiat had enough pocket money and fame to hang at galleries and glam bars, doing heroin and dating starlets like the then unknown Madonna. He befriended and was fostered by the artists Andy Warhol and Kieth Haring. His work sold for millions, the world was his; then he died of a heroin overdose in August, 1988, age 27. 

His work? Yeah, he painted. Semi-abstract, expressionistic paintings, with thick naive lines and bright, perhaps unmixed colors, sometimes collage-like, sometimes not. The composition is random and splotchy, and if there is a theme it is the distortion of the body into components, and of painting itself into a meditation on the potentiality of art as a neo-primitive celebration of form and expression. There are an abundance of trigger-images: guns and skulls and halos and fists, empty things that create a visceral response begging to be informed. Many saw in Basquiat an artistic, angry heir to centuries of slavery and oppression. In the end, like many successful artists (where success is termed in units sold, and buzz generated) Basquiat is an empty vessel you can pour whatever you like into - love, hate, perhaps even indifference. Pictured is Untitled (Fallen Angel), from 1981, which sold for 11 million dollars in 2008.

I have to admit I don't really like Basquiat's work. It's naive and vulgar at the same time, and in his lines and color you can easily see it's the work of an addict on a manic high, slapping his subconscious directly to the canvas with no editing. But with those same words, I can also describe what people love about his work. The idea that it's the end-product of millennia of oppression is interesting, but still not enough to make me want to hang it in my house. It just seems like the sort of thing a surly middle-schooler could do, too unpolished for my taste.

And that's all okay, since his work seems designed to be divisive. In fact, the rise of Basquiat created one of the great debates of modern art. Oddly enough, and perhaps predictably, the debate had little to do with art. There are those, like Robert Hughes, who simply think his work is no good, who see Basquiat as the product of an art culture eager to foster multiculturalism and make pets of wild outsiders, who victimized him and left him for dead, then cashed in on his corpse. But Basquait was just as surely a manipulator himself, a man who saw in the art world an eager market for whatever he could churn out. Or maybe he was just a junkie who'd found a way to keep himself in smack. Or maybe you can invent your own story here, and invest it with your own meaning no one else can usurp; and maybe that's the great legacy of artists like Basquiat.